The Italian Americans

by Maria Laurino

  Un’ altra cent’ anni! To another one hundred years!

  I NOSTRI PAESANI

  Adriana Trigiani

  Adriana Trigiani is the New York Times best-selling author of fifteen books that have been translated into over thirty-five languages. Her experiences growing up in Roseto, Pennsylvania, influenced her novel The Queen of the Big Time, based on the town’s annual celebration of its patron saint, Our Lady of Mount Carmel—or “the Big Time,” as the occasion is called by the young women who compete to be the pageant’s queen. Trigiani’s family moved from Roseto to Big Stone Gap, Virginia, the setting and title of her debut novel, which was followed by three sequels.

  Q: What was life in Roseto like when you were growing up?

  Trigiani: Some of my most incredible childhood memories are from Roseto, Pennsylvania. Everything centered around the church, the Mass, the pageantry of the Mass, which I always found incredibly profound. If you go into Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, there’s a golden light in there, and I’d imagine that was what heaven would be like. Then you’d walk down the street, and you’d go to Cousin Ralph’s, and they’d have cocktails after Mass or a drink. Then there would be dinner, and we’d go down to my Great-Aunt Mary’s. It was fantastic because the pasta was homemade and the sauce was homemade. We’d spend hours in the basement rolling pasta.

  Q: How was Roseto, Pennsylvania, similar to Roseto Valfortore in Italy?

  Trigiani: It’s crazy; when you go to Roseto Valfortore and then you come to Roseto, Pennsylvania, they’re mirror images of each other. The double porches were part of two-family homes. They had those porches in Italy, so they built them in Roseto. The first group that came here went to work in the slate quarries. Basically, the folks hiring the Italians ghettoized them and gave them this hill. When you go up that hill, you think you’re going to see an ocean on the other side. You’re in Pennsylvania. There’s no ocean, but when you go up that hill, it feels like it does when you’re in Italy and see the ocean. They may have tried to give us the worst piece of land, but it ended up being just as beautiful as in Italy.

  Q: Doctors have been studying Roseto for decades because of its once low rate of heart disease. Do you think there are lessons to be learned from Roseto?

  Trigiani: It’s very interesting to me, living in our times, when we’re struggling with how to take care of people. The best thing we can do for one another is provide work. In Roseto, they came up with an incredible idea, which was to put the women to work during the school hours of the day. You walked your kid to school, then you went to the factory, and you worked until three o’clock, when you would pick up your child and go home. You had every generation of the family living in the home, so you never had a babysitter. If you study Roseto, you see that the factories are right next door to the houses. There wasn’t a commute. You didn’t need a second car. The men went off to work in the slate quarries, or they were farmers, or they had factory jobs themselves. We so often hear that women’s working or being ambitious imperils home life, but it just wasn’t true. Roseto is the perfect model to show you that there is a better way to live, where everybody benefits when everybody works.

  Q: How do you think the cultural values of Roseto helped protect people from stress?

  Trigiani: The Italian way of life offsets stress because in Italy, and you can still see this today, it’s very intergenerational, interdependent. People didn’t just move away. They stayed pretty much within a town. You, hopefully, fell in love with somebody local, and you built a family, and then your parents babysat, and they were there. The Italian way of life is so simple. It’s take care of your own, keep your nose clean, enjoy the table, enjoy the gathering of your family. Make it as beautiful as you can with what you have. Invite the neighbor in. Keep your heart at ease. And work, work, work.

  Q: Can you describe how the women in your family shopped and cooked?

  Trigiani: You shopped local. It was grown local, but here’s the thing that always got me about Roseto—there was never a want. If somebody canned peppers, they brought you a couple quarts. Also, nothing was ever wasted. Everything in the hands of these women became a delicacy. When we would come in from mowing the lawn or doing some chores for my grandmother, she would take dandelion greens that she had picked, toss them in olive oil, then poach eggs in her gravy, in the red sauce, and ladle those eggs, fresh eggs, over the greens, and serve it with bread. You will never eat anything more delicious. Think about that meal. Does that meal even cost fifteen cents? You’ve got the dandelions in your yard. You’ve got the eggs and the gravy, and everybody ate well. They took nothing and made something out of it. That’s very, very Italian to me.

  Q: Why did your family move from Roseto?

  Trigiani: My dad was working for his parents at their mill in the mid-1960s. Garment manufacturing was a big business in the North, profitable and community based. My dad used to say that anyone could throw up ten sewing machines back then and make a living. Around 1966, the federal Small Business Administration did a big push to find young entrepreneurs in the North to go south to open garment factories. This was a key element of the War on Poverty programs; the idea was to bring industry to the South, using the successful model from communities like Roseto and other places in the North to provide jobs for the people who needed them most. The government wanted to model the success of these factories in a poverty-stricken place called Appalachia (which was defined as a landmass that stretched from southwestern Virginia all the way down to Georgia). The government representatives told my dad he could put up a factory anywhere he chose in the Appalachian region. Dad said the rate was so low, it was irresistible. He was thirty-three years old and ready to be his own boss.

  Q: How did your grandmother take the move?

  Trigiani: My grandmother Viola—my father’s mother—visited us in Big Stone Gap soon after we moved down south. I asked her if she liked it, and she said, “I could never live in a place where they don’t make cheese.”

  For Italians during the first great wave of immigration to America, family would be their source of strength and survival, but the values that sustained them in places like Roseto, Pennsylvania, would also put them at odds with the rest of the country. Roseto’s residents—like Italian Americans elsewhere—tended to wall themselves off, mistrusting outsiders and outside institutions. That self-imposed isolation made it harder for them to assimilate into mainstream American life.

  The instinct to trust only the family—to believe, as parents routinely told their children, that “blood is thicker than water”—is deeply rooted in the complex history of Italy, a land invaded and conquered for thousands of years and occupied by foreign countries well into the nineteenth century. This fractured history distinguishes and separates the Italian experience from all the rest of southern Europe.

  The nearly century-long project to unite Italy began after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and was completed with the annexation of Rome from the Papal States in 1870. But even after unification, the land and people of the north and the south couldn’t have been more divided, geographically and culturally. The north offered a landscape of undulating copper hills, suitable as background to the images of fine-boned ladies in Renaissance portraits, and boasted unparalleled achievements in art, architecture, and literature.

  By contrast, Italy south of Rome, known as the Mezzogiorno (literally, “midday”), was a dusty, arid land where illiterate peasants slavishly toiled for aristocratic landowners. About 85 percent of the Italians who came to the United States were from southern Italy. The bleakness of the region was immortalized in the Italian writer Carlo Levi’s book Christ Stopped at Eboli, whose title comes from a peasant saying that Christ could not have traveled any farther than the fertile land of Eboli, which lies south of Naples in the region of Campania.

  Unlike the lush northern terrain, the south of Italy was an arid land where peasants slavishly toiled.

  A twentieth-century Italian parliamentary investigation revealed that the
wages of peasants had remained the same since 1780.

  “We’re not Christians,” the peasants told Levi. They meant that they were not “human beings”; they were too far below the status of the blessed. Levi was banished in 1935 to a small town in Basilicata, then known as Lucania, because of his opposition to Fascism. The government’s decision to exile its opponents to the south is a stark reminder for Italian Americans that the bleak, impoverished life of their ancestors was barely a step above imprisonment in the minds of northern Italians.

  “No one has come to this land,” wrote Levi, “except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding. The seasons pass today over the toil of the peasants just as they did three thousand years before Christ; no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty.” Indeed, an Italian parliamentary investigation in the early twentieth century revealed an extraordinary fact: the wages of peasants had remained the same since 1780.

  But in the mid-nineteenth century, southern Italian peasants—especially those from Sicily, considered the most revolutionary area of the country because of its extensive poverty—were holding out some hope for change. They placed their faith in a leading figure of Italian unification, the indefatigable soldier Giuseppe Garibaldi, to restore justice to their land.

  The unification of Italy was Garibaldi’s lifelong passion. As a young man, Garibaldi was largely influenced by the writings of the Italian radical thinker Giuseppe Mazzini, and he joined Mazzini’s secret revolutionary group, Young Italy, which sought to liberate citizens from rule by kings. After being condemned to death in absentia for taking part in a Mazzini-inspired revolution in Genoa, at twenty-eight Garibaldi sailed to South America. He remained there for over a decade, leading the Italian Legion fighters during Uruguay’s war with Argentina, and receiving military training that would be essential to his guerilla battle for Italian unification. Although he was exiled from Italy several times, Garibaldi always managed to find a way back, and most of his life consisted of a series of seemingly hopeless battles with an ill-supplied, ragtag army of Italian volunteers dressed in red shirts, throwing bayonets in the face of enemy bullets, or carrying rifles that, more often than not, refused to fire.

  Garibaldi was one of four main players of Italian unification in the mid-nineteenth century, charting a course by rallying his vagabond army and trying to work with men who mostly detested each other—the revolutionary thinker Mazzini, the unpredictable monarch Victor Emmanuel II, and the scheming prime minister Camillo di Cavour. To add to the complexity of the quest for national unity, both Victor Emmanuel and Cavour, products of Austrian and French culture in the north, struggled throughout their lives to speak the Italian language.

  In 1860, Garibaldi decided to lead his army, known as the Red Shirts or the “Thousand” (technically there were 1,089 volunteers), to Sicily to defeat the Bourbons, a dynasty that had originated in France and now ruled Italy’s southern provinces. It was a bold move that may have been based on faulty information about a peasant insurrection in the provinces, which in reality had been suppressed. But a combination of Garibaldi’s shrewd military skill and some extraordinary good luck created a scenario that ultimately led to the capture of Sicily and the defeat of twenty-five thousand Neapolitan troops under Bourbon rule.

  After the Thousand won an astounding victory in the town of Calatafimi in Sicily, Garibaldi advanced his troops to Palermo. He thought that his only means of defeating the huge Bourbon army depended on getting his men into Palermo undetected and inciting the peasant population to revolt. It was a gamble based on the fact that not a single member of the peasantry in the north or the south had ever joined his nationalist cause. “I wish from my heart,” wrote Garibaldi about the Thousand in his memoirs, “that I could have added ‘and of the peasant’” to the list of the bricklayers, carpenters, cobblers, engineers, lawyers, and students who joined his army. “But I will not distort the truth. That sturdy and hard-working class belongs to the priests, who keep them in ignorance. There was not one case of them joining the volunteers.”

  But in Palermo, a different picture emerged. After his victory in Calatafimi, thirty miles away, the people of Palermo rose up in revolt. The peasants emerged from the streets and piazzas bearing knives and daggers. The women—“awe-inspiring,” in Garibaldi’s words—hurled mattresses, chairs, and furniture from their windows to form barricades against the Neapolitan troops trying to enter the city, and some even poured pots of boiling water on the soldiers who had found their way in.

  Garibaldi’s ultimate victory meant that the old Kingdom of Sardinia would become the new Kingdom of Italy, with Victor Emmanuel made its ruler in 1861. The final pieces of this unification, called the Risorgimento, would still take another ten years to put into place. The populist Garibaldi had promised to carry out land reform immediately, but the new monarch preferred to keep the power in the hands of property owners. Conditions deteriorated even further after Garibaldi, who served as the temporary “dictator” of Sicily, introduced two highly unpopular measures: new taxes and a military conscription. Now the peasants, with barely enough food to live on, had to dig deeper into worn pockets to pay taxes that would rise by more than 50 percent. They also had to watch their boys leave home to join a military and defend a country that seemed as foreign to them as the divided land from before.

  The peasants were unwilling to join Garibaldi’s nationalist cause until he reached Sicily.

  Italian peasant girl, 1861.

  The Austrian Prince Klemens von Metternich’s famous line that Italy was “only a geographical expression” certainly was borne out in the life of the peasants who spoke a regional dialect, knew little beyond village life, and never thought of themselves as “Italian” or had the time to daydream about any nationalist cause. They didn’t even know the word Italia, with many believing that “La Talia” was Victor Emmanuel’s wife. And how could the peasants wave a flag for patriotism without political say? Only about 5 percent of the male population was allowed to vote. To add to the unfairness, the south paid more in taxes, as a percentage of its wealth and economic output, than the north but received less in government aid and services. The belittlement of southerners by northerners—still acutely felt in parts of Italy today—first blossomed after unification, when the north had to pay more attention to its new brethren. “What barbarism!” declared Italian statesman Luigi Carlo Farini after visiting the south. “This is not Italy! This is Africa.”

  By 1880, a decade after a fully unified Italy, southern Italian peasants could barely survive. In cities and countryside, unemployment, crime, disease, and squalor had become unbearable; the lack of food and money even left some women scraping plaster off their walls to mix into dough in order to stretch the bread supply. These brutal conditions meant that the peasants became even more distrustful of outside authority. The state was seen only as the entity that robbed you of the meager amount you tried to save. “What could they possibly put a new tax on?” wrote Ignazio Silone about peasant life. “Maybe a tax on moonlight?”

  Daily life also became much more dangerous: as tax revolts spread throughout the south, local brigands took advantage of the turmoil, wreaking havoc on the land by attacking farms and killing livestock. The government responded by imposing a military law that led to arbitrary arrests and executions. Garibaldi, long dispensed from his duties and discarded by those in power “like an orange peel,” described his disillusionment: “The outrages suffered by the people of Southern Italy cannot be quantified. I am convinced that I did nothing wrong, but despite that today I would not take the same route in Southern Italy as I would fear that I would be attacked by stones, because the result was only squalor and hatred.”

  Under the miserable conditions they had to endure, southern Italians began to hear and to heed the call to America.

  Under these untenable conditions, southern Italians began to hear and to heed the call to America—one that would bring five million people in the course of a centu
ry. Word spread throughout isolated villages about those brave enough to leave. American companies put up posters in villages promising pots of gold, state governments recruiting workers sent out leaflets announcing work opportunities, and letters from the earliest migrants beckoned those left behind to cross the ocean. The Italian government tried to discourage emigration, because large landowners needed the peasantry to work the land.

  At the end of the nineteenth century it became clear that Garibaldi’s dream of a united country had helped to spur its greatest exodus, with the population heading to other countries around the world. By 1905, over seven million people had applied to migrate; it is estimated that the country lost more than sixteen million people between the 1870s and the early 1920s. Trust no one outside the family, and concomitantly, invest all your precious resources in the family, became the credo that southern Italian peasants would bring to America and choose to live by.

  Giuseppe Garibaldi

  In a tiny cottage in Staten Island, New York, home of the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum, the cherished symbol of Italian unification—the red shirt—hangs behind glass. The curious choice for a uniform—the bright color announced itself to the enemy like a modern-day traffic light—can be traced to Garibaldi’s days in Uruguay, when he led the Italian Legion in 1843. The government, wanting to skimp on the costs of uniforms, found boxes of red overalls intended for Argentine cattle-slaughtering houses, the color blending with the gory work. Garibaldi liked wearing the loose-fitting tunic and decided to make it the uniform of his volunteer Italian army, earning them the moniker “Red Shirts.” In the nineteenth century, fashion-crazed aristocratic British women infatuated with the iconoclastic Italian began wearing the shirt, a version of which hangs in Staten Island and marks Garibaldi’s time living in exile there—one of the stranger interludes in his storied career.